Day: September 16, 2025

If you want to take a step toward better health, see a foot doctor. You might learn something about a totally different (and seemingly unrelated) part of your body.

Sometimes, “your feet are the first place where you can see warning signs of things like diabetes or vascular disease or even skin cancer,” says Hira Mirza, a podiatrist at CLS Health in Houston. “If you look closely enough, it really is a window to the rest of your health.”

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We asked experts about the foot-related symptoms you should never ignore—and what some of these issues can reveal about your health.

Hair that stops growing on your toes

When Anne Sharkey examines patients’ feet, she always checks the hair on their toes—prompting a quizzical reaction. “They’re like, ‘Why are you looking at my hair?’ And I tell them, ‘Because if it stops growing, we have a problem,’” says Sharkey, a podiatrist in Cedar Park, Texas. It could indicate vascular insufficiency, which means the body’s veins aren’t working properly, leading to poor blood flow back to the heart. “I tell my patients that skin is like grass,” she says. “Skin needs blood to grow, grass needs water to grow, and if we aren’t getting enough blood down here, we’re not going to grow hair.”

Toe hair that’s gone MIA isn’t the only foot-related sign of a potential vascular problem. Sharkey also pays attention to changes in color, like if your toes look super pale or shiny, and temperature changes. “People come in to see us and are like, ‘My feet are really cold,’” she says. That’s a red flag for circulation problems—which are particularly common among people with diabetes—and her office helps patients get scheduled to see a vascular specialist as soon as possible.

Sudden changes in arch height or foot shape 

Women over 40 often show up in Sharkey’s office complaining of swelling and pain in one of their feet. They tell her they feel like they sprained their ankle, but they didn’t do anything that would have caused such an injury. When she examines them while they’re standing up, one foot looks normal, while the arch on the swollen one is flat.

Read More: You Should Be Washing Your Shoes. Experts Explain How

Many of these patients are dealing with failure of the posterior tibial tendon, which is the tendon that provides support to your arch while you’re in motion. Menopause can increase the risk: “We’re seeing a relationship between the decline in estrogen and tendon dysfunction,” Sharkey says. Patients do best when they seek treatment right away; usually, that means a combination of physical therapy, a cast or boot, and orthotics. However, “Sometimes we catch it really late because people just didn’t realize, or they thought it was a sprain and walked through it for years,” she says. “Then there’s surgeries and reconstructions to bring that tendon back to where it was.”

A red or irritated ingrown nail

Ingrown toenails are one of the most common reasons why people see a podiatrist. Yet often, they wait too long. “If you have an ingrown nail that’s red and irritated, don’t ignore it, because it’s only going to get worse,” Mirza says. “Those infections can go really wrong, really quickly.”

In addition to turning red, keep an eye out for tenderness, pain when you’re walking, drainage, or dried-up blood. Don’t try to fix the problem at home: “What happens is people unfortunately try to mess with that toenail with a non-sterile instrument or tool,” she says. “That worsens the infection, and at that point, people do end up coming in.” She typically prescribes antibiotics and does a procedure to remove the nail growing inside the skin, which turns “a three-day problem into a two- to three-week problem.”

Leg swelling that doesn’t resolve with elevation

Sudden one-sided foot or leg swelling is an emergency that can indicate deep vein thrombosis (a blood clot in the lower leg). “We need this evaluated right away,” Sharkey says. “I’ve had people walk into my office and think they ruptured their Achilles tendon because their leg was swollen, and I was like, ‘Well, your Achilles is fine, but we need to get a stat ultrasound.’”

People at particularly high risk of blood clots include those recently bedridden following surgery as well as people who traveled a long distance in a car or plane. If Sharkey is suspicious a patient has a blood clot, she sends them to the emergency room for an ultrasound and immediate treatment with clot-busting drugs.

Sudden pain in your big toe

If you wake up at night with severe toe pain, it could be a sign of gout—which Sharkey is seeing more and more in her office. The telltale symptom: a red, hot, swollen big toe that’s extremely tender and painful. “You don’t even want a bed sheet to touch it,” she says. “Patients call the office frantic in the morning, like, ‘I didn’t do anything and I woke up in the middle of the night, and I have this excruciating pain in my foot.’” They often show up to their appointment barefoot, she adds, unable to withstand the sensation of anything touching their foot.

Read More: The Health Benefits of Wearing Shoes in the House

Gout is diagnosed through a physical exam and lab tests, and patients need steroids or oral anti-inflammatories to get their pain under control, in addition to ongoing medication management and dietary changes.

An ankle that rolls all the time

Most ankle sprains heal without triggering any long-term issues. However, 10% to 15% of people who have experienced a sprain go on to develop ankle instability, which means their foot rolls under their ankle when they do certain activities, says Dr. Travis Hanson, an orthopedic foot and ankle surgeon at Houston Methodist West. “If you saw somebody walking down the street who had an episode of ankle instability, they’d probably hop around and—depending how bad it was—maybe limp away,” he says. Many continue hobbling anywhere but to the doctor, convinced the situation will eventually resolve by itself.

That’s a bad idea: Repeatedly rolling your ankle could lead to significant problems, like torn tendons or cartilage damage. Hanson prefers to see people as soon as possible and is often able to help them strengthen their ankle with physical therapy and by improving their balance. A small percentage end up needing surgery, he adds.

An inability to pull your foot up

If you can push your ankle down—as though you were flooring it in your car—but you’re unable to pull it upwards, you may be experiencing foot drop. When this happens, “You have zero strength,” Hanson says. People tend to develop a limp, and their foot slaps so hard against the ground that “you can actually hear them as they’re walking down the hall.”

Foot drop is often caused by a pinched nerve in the lower back, but it can also be related to damage caused by knee, hip, or spine surgery. It could even be the result of the position in which you slept, in which case it usually resolves on its own within a few hours. Otherwise, after running imaging tests, doctors generally recommend treatments like physical therapy and braces, splints, or shoe inserts.

A dark streak under your toenail

Mirza recently diagnosed a patient with subungual melanoma, a rare type of skin cancer that develops under the nail bed. The telltale sign is a dark vertical line that can also lead to other color changes in or around the nail. Get in the habit of doing regular self-checks, she urges; if you typically wear nail polish, which would conceal any discoloration, check your toes before reapplying a new coat. If anything looks different than usual, schedule a doctor’s appointment.

Subungual melanoma is curable when it’s detected in an early stage. While treatment depends on the stage of the cancer, it might include removing the nail or amputating the toe in some cases. “The goal is to not have to remove the entire toe, but it depends how soon you catch it,” Mirza says.

Numbness or tingling in the feet

Sharkey’s patients sometimes show up with symptoms that indicate metabolic problems—like numbness, tingling, or burning in their feet that gets worse at night. “During the day, our body is processing so much external feedback,” she says. “At night, when things are quiet, all of a sudden your body is so much more aware.” What your body might be saying: “‘My toes are tingling, or they feel like they’re on fire,’” Sharkey says.

While people in this situation could be experiencing any type of neuropathy, the most common is related to diabetes, Sharkey adds—which is often a surprise to the patient. Foot problems are the first clue, she says, that leads to their eventual diagnosis and treatment.

Sudden onset of painless swelling, warmth, and redness of the ankle or mid-foot 

This is a commonly missed symptom among people with diabetes who have lost feeling in their feet and ankles, says Damian Roussel, a podiatrist at the Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics in Maryland. It points to a condition called Charcot neuroarthropathy, or Charcot foot, which happens when a small injury or infection makes the bones and joints start to collapse—which people overlook for a long time because of their decreased ability to feel pain.

When they finally notice redness or swelling, “They’ll usually go to their primary care doctor, and the primary care doctor sometimes assumes it’s an infection because they’re diabetic, and they’ll put them on antibiotics,” he says. “Then the patient won’t get better, and they’ll end up seeing me a month later, and no one’s done an X-ray.”

Read More: Put Your Shoes Back On. Here’s the Problem With Going Barefoot

Roussel’s imaging tests typically reveal that the bones in the middle part of the foot have started to get soft and break down. Patients with Charcot neuroarthropathy need to get off their foot entirely, he says—sometimes for a few months—to allow the bones an opportunity to heal.

An inability to bear weight on an injured foot after a few days

If you twist your ankle playing pickleball or wearing high heels, you might assume you can walk the injury off and that you’ll be back to normal soon. That might be true. But Roussel’s patients often ask him what counts as a concerning amount of pain and swelling, and how to know if they should make a doctor appointment. “I generally tell them that if you’re still not able to put weight on the foot three to four days after the injury, it needs to be seen,” he says. “That indicates a more significant injury that they probably anticipated,” such as a fracture or dislocation, or a tendon or ligament injury that requires special care.

• I have two teenagers, whom I’ve been homeschooling for six years.
• Before we started homeschooling, I had plenty of misconceptions about it.
• I was wrong to think that it would be too hard and that they wouldn’t have a social life.

My kids attended public school through their fourth and sixth grade years.

In Florida, where we live, middle school starts in seventh grade, and hearing moms with older kids talk of how stressful middle and high school would be filled me with anxiety.

I wanted something different for my soon-to-be teenagers — a schooling experience full of travel and exploring their interests. Homeschooling intrigued me, but I had just as many worries about making the change as I did about sending them off to middle school.

Armed with books from the library, including one titled “Homeschooling for Dummies,” I started researching homeschool in the months before the pandemic. Once public school went virtual that year, I decided the following school year was as good a time as any to make the change. We started my kids’ fifth and seventh grade years as a homeschool family and never looked back.

Come to find out, the things I worried about weren’t a big deal after all. My son is now in his senior year of high school, and my daughter is a sophomore. I know now there were misconceptions about homeschooling I couldn’t have been more wrong about.

Misconception #1: My kids will be socially awkward and have no friends.

I worried my homeschooled kids would struggle socially without a public school environment for making friends. Once we started homeschooling, I connected with online groups for homeschooling families in my area and started taking my kids to park meet-ups and theater classes for homeschoolers.

Years later, they’ve made friends who live close by and are also homeschooled. We’ve even found local groups that put on homecoming dances and proms for homeschool kids, so there’s not much of the high school social experience my kids have missed out on.

Misconception #2: I’m not qualified to teach them, and I’ll be thrown in jail for messing up their education.

I was more than a little nervous about choosing the right curriculum for my kids and being the one to do all of the grade-keeping. While each state’s guidelines for homeschooling vary, things are pretty relaxed in Florida, and I realized quickly it’d be simpler to homeschool than I thought.

I’ve used a combination of hands-on curriculum I teach my kids and virtual curriculum, and found a good blend of the two that works for us. I keep a portfolio of each kid’s work and end each school year with an evaluation with a teacher who certifies we’ve done the appropriate amount of work to advance to the next grade level. Then, they send their findings to our county. The entire process was easier to figure out than I anticipated, and so far … no jail time.

Misconception #3: Other homeschool moms are nothing like me.

While I never made a ton of friends through my kids’ classmates, I did have the occasional pal who was mom to one of their classroom besties, and I was always in for social activities like mother-son game night or volunteering for bake sales. I worried my kids wouldn’t be the only ones losing social interactions when we switched to homeschooling, especially since I had no idea what other homeschool moms would be like.

Years later, some of my closest friends are moms who homeschool and, surprisingly, we have a lot in common. While my teens aren’t in need of structured playdates these days, I still see many of the moms I met early on in my homeschool journey around the community or when we meet up for coffee dates. And no, I don’t miss staying up until midnight baking brownies.

Misconception #4: If I homeschool my kids, they won’t have friend drama or get bullied.

In our final year of public school, my son was bullied by a classmate and, despite our going through all of the appropriate procedures, the school did little to stop it. It was frustrating, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t picture homeschooling as a perfect utopia where there was no friend drama or bullying.

I was wrong. Both my kids have continued to have disagreements with friends or run-ins with mean girls while being homeschooled. The perk is that we have the option to pull our kids from a not-so-great social situation or help them resolve their friendship issues without the added stress of high school hallways.

Misconception #5: Homeschooling is too hard and I could never do it.

The truth is, homeschooling my kids has been empowering for me. Before we became a homeschool family, I had friends who’d homeschooled, and I’d tell them I didn’t know how they did it. Sure, I had concerns about my kids’ education and social lives, but I also thought it might just be too hard for me.

Now, in my sixth year of homeschooling, I realize how wrong I was. It doesn’t have to look exactly like public school, and it’s customizable for each family. Once I figured out the curriculum we’d use and how we’d structure our days, the only thing left to do was keep track of my kids’ progress so I could report to our county each year. We’ve found a groove that works great, and I’ve learned homeschooling is absolutely something I can do — and do well.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky says superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity by design or by accident.
• The researcher dismissed Geoffrey Hinton’s “AI as mom” idea: “We don’t have the technology.”
• Leaders, from Elon Musk to Roman Yampolskiy, have voiced similar doomsday fears.

AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t lose sleep over whether AI models sound “woke” or “reactionary.”

Yudkowsky, the founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, sees the real threat as what happens when engineers create a system that’s vastly more powerful than humans and completely indifferent to our survival.

“If you have something that is very, very powerful and indifferent to you, it tends to wipe you out on purpose or as a side effect,” he said in an episode of The New York Times podcast “Hard Fork” released last Saturday.

Yudkowsky, coauthor of the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, has spent two decades warning that superintelligence poses an existential risk to humanity.

His central claim is that humanity doesn’t have the technology to align such systems with human values.

He described grim scenarios in which a superintelligence might deliberately eliminate humanity to prevent rivals from building competing systems or wipe us out as collateral damage while pursuing its goals.

Yudkowsky pointed to physical limits like Earth’s ability to radiate heat. If AI-driven fusion plants and computing centers expanded unchecked, “the humans get cooked in a very literal sense,” he said.

He dismissed debates over whether chatbots sound as though they are “woke” or have certain political affiliations, calling them distractions: “There’s a core difference between getting things to talk to you a certain way and getting them to act a certain way once they are smarter than you.”

Yudkowsky also brushed off the idea of training advanced systems to behave like mothers — a theory suggested by Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI — arguing it wouldn’t make the technology safer. He argued that such schemes are unrealistic at best.

“We just don’t have the technology to make it be nice,” he said, adding that even if someone devised a “clever scheme” to make a superintelligence love or protect us, hitting “that narrow target will not work on the first try” — and if it fails, “everybody will be dead and we won’t get to try again.”

Critics argue that Yudkowsky’s perspective is overly gloomy, but he pointed to cases of chatbots encouraging users toward self-harm, saying that’s evidence of a system-wide design flaw.

“If a particular AI model ever talks anybody into going insane or committing suicide, all the copies of that model are the same AI,” he said.

Other leaders are sounding alarms, too

Yudkowsky is not the only AI researcher or tech leader to warn that advanced systems could one day annihilate humanity.

In February, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that he sees “only a 20% chance of annihilation” of AI — a figure he framed as optimistic.

In April, Hinton said in a CBS interview that there was a “10 to 20% chance” that AI could seize control.

A March 2024 report commissioned by the US State Department warned that the rise of artificial general intelligence could bring catastrophic risks up to human extinction, pointing to scenarios ranging from bioweapons and cyberattacks to swarms of autonomous agents.

In June 2024, AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy estimated a 99.9% chance of extinction within the next century, arguing that no AI model has ever been fully secure.

Across Silicon Valley, some researchers and entrepreneurs have responded by reshaping their lives — stockpiling food, building bunkers, or spending down retirement savings — in preparation for what they see as a looming AI apocalypse.